Sunday's Advertiser carried a story that —as my father might have said—"Does Lafayette proud." I recommend locals and fans give the full story a read. The article hangs its hook on Kit Becnel's Academy of Information Technology (AOIT). A school within a school at Carencro High, AOIT prepares students for careers in the broad field of information technology and is affiliated with the national academy foundation. AOIT is a leader in the national academy and its leadership sits on several committees driving changes in the national program. The award cited in the story was actually given to Louisiana Public Broadcasting and showcases several of Lafayette's tech jewels including LUS Fiber, LITE, AOC, and AOIT:
Louisiana Public Broadcasting partnered with Lafayette Utility System, Bay Area Video Coalition and Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) to enhance technology and instruction at Carencro High School. This project provided more bandwidth to the school, expanding instruction to include creation of 3-D models and training students for careers in technology.
But beyond AOIT's award the article also delves into Durel, Huval, and Bertrand's recent appearance at Google's DC headquarters. Not surprisingly, since attendees at that conclave included the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and the CIO of San Francisco AOIT's reputation was already well-known.
...many of those invited to the event at Google's headquarters already knew about the academy and Becnel's work."The pioneering spirit exists in Lafayette with our LUS Fiber and the work and energy of people like Ms. Becnel," Bertrand said at the meeting. "You're going to hear her name again and you're going to hear it a lot. The entire United States is envious of what we've done. It's no small feat."
Also in this mix is Acadiana Open Channel (AOC) who is providing support and training for AOIT. Part of the conversation
The invitation-only event in D.C. was a workshop on broadband and the public interest, and was co-presented by the Ford Foundation and the Paley Center for Media...."Their purpose was to talk about how digital public media networks should advance in broadband and enrich connected communities," Huval said...
Lafayette officials discussed LUS Fiber, including how it is used in all Lafayette Parish public schools and is expected to be throughout the whole city by this summer. As the infrastructure portion of it nears completion, Huval said the focus will turn toward how fiber can be applied in both schools and the community.
That last (my emphasis) is what the community is waiting to hear. The benefits to education through the school system and to public media through AOC are simply the entering edge of the wedge.
The dreams continue to come...Huval, widely know for his prowess on the fiddle and his advocacy of Cajun culture, tossed out this one which will surely resonate with Lafayette's Creole and Cajun communities:
"You could have the ability for a French immersion school to work on a project with students in Paris, France, and have this real-life collaboration," Huval said. "The technology now allows you to have the exchange of ideas and understanding that you could only get in-person before. This is only the beginning. To have this little oasis of Lafayette, La. have the ability to do these kinds of things is really exciting for a lot of people."
Perhaps unknown to Huval the futuristic dream of cross-cultural francophone educational collaboration is already being realized in a project organized by WSIL (World Studies Institute of Louisiana). The pilot project, underway currently, connects classrooms in New Brunswick, Louisiana, and Haiti. Students and their teacher collaborate through Lafayette Commons, a Lafayette nonprofit that supplies the educational edition of Google Apps and support to the project.
The benefit of a community-owned fiber-optic telecommunications system to Lafayette and communities like Lafayette lies less in the technology than in the fact of public ownership. Having built our own network we can now choose to do things to benefit the people and community institutions.
Building our network was the first step—and that is nearing completion. Taking the resource of our new network and firing up the process of doing something useful with it was the next step. That process has already begun.
(full disclosure: I sit on the board of AOC, the advisory board of AOIT, and help supply services via Lafayette Commons to WSIL's project.)
Lagniappe: LUS and Lafayette have applied for the Google Gig FTTH project; apparently as a direct result of conversations held at the meeting in DC according to an exchange I had with Huval...more on that surprise when I get a little time.
technology innovators to review government and community services and develop tools that will improve lives by making it easier for citizens to receive these services through mobile and online applications.
For the FCC's part—they are interested in increasing the rate of broadband adoption in "lagging" sectors and see potential in useful apps for achieving that goal.
The Knight Foundation is fronting the money. Details are not yet available but the Knight Foundation suggests that they've got three core beliefs that this challenge would serve:
First, our ideal of informed, engaged communities; second, our conviction that universal broadband is key to achieving this ideal; and third, our deep interest in using new approaches to connect with innovators.
The inclusion of mobile platforms and highlighting it with the allusion to "Apps" is probably pretty good policy. Recent research shows that more of the poor and minority populations that are lagging in net connection are adopting wireless devices more rapidly than the rest of the population...mobile's probably a pretty good target.
There's been a recent push in Lafayette to get more governmental data available online. We've even got a placeholder location for hosting data in an accessible form. Some places, like San Francisco, are a bit further along in having its data available in a form developers find useful. It'd be a neat project for somebody—or some civic-minded group of geeks. I'd sure like to have a version for the Lafayette Commons' gadget page....
“Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the world”
...Archimedes, 220 BC
Google needs Lafayette, and Amsterdam and Vasteras and....any of the fibered-up cities you might care to name. And, of course, Lafayette needs Google. That's been true for some time. But it recently became much clearer. The big news on the internets these last few days has been Google's newly announced Google Chrome OS. Most of the coverage has been predictable and mediocre but more thoughtfully analytical stories have finally begun to appear. (cf. the NYTimes) Even in the better articles the focus is inevitably on Google vs. Microsoft. While that might be understandable given that a battle between the two has become a journalistic stock-in-trade that is used to "explain" every move that either makes it really doesn't seem like the best analytic starting point for understanding what is going on. The fact that Google's OS isn't good for Microsoft is incidental to what Google—and a few other web players—are trying to do aid an ongoing process. Exactly what that process is requires a little explaining:
What's Going On Anyway? The backstory
The world is shifting yet again; this time onto the web from the computer. Not so long ago we moved much of our activity onto the computer —be they mainframes, PDAs, desktops, or laptops. The world shifted from only having physical objects that were unique or functionally identical copies of the unique object (think newspapers) to having perfect digital copies that paradoxically almost infinitely changeable, copyable, and decomposable (think email). The myriad internets focused on finding other computers and on transferring files between them. Mostly you worked on files locally in your own complete environment—even when you were actually a client "your" computer desktop had a separate copy of the document that you worked on. No more: while we struggle to come to grips with the social changes accompanying digitalization we find ourselves undergoing yet another shift off computers and onto the web. This shift widens the scope; it is easy to have a single unique copy that many people alter in addition to single, stable copies and many transforms of the original. That shift promises to make it possible to do our work with less duplication—of files, of storage, and of processing power and promises to pass the savings on to the final user.
Really, it's all about leverage The world is shifting and Google, with one of the longest levers, is trying to increase its leverage by moving the fulcrum ever closer to the weight it wants to move. The whole point of levers is to move a huge weight with a small force and the closer your fulcrum is to the weight you want to shift the greater you mechanical advantage. [image] The huge weight that Google wants to move is the "dead weight" of the existing paradigm of single, local, users that periodically transfer files. The emerging model is one which shifts toward multiple, distributed users that remain connected to files that are, themselves located in multiple, distributed "places."
The new Google OS is all about building an OS that is optimized for that new environment. Right now we have an operating environment in which we are using a computer/local-user-centric OS to access the web. From the standpoint of web-centric use such OSs are bloated, slathered over with useless "features" and surprisingly anemic when it comes to operating quickly and securely within in the new "always-connected" world.
Note that moving us in this direction is what Google has been from the beginning: making it easy and cheap to move to a web-centric mode of interaction. Google's innovation in web search is all about using web links and web stats to make good guesses about what is sought. That made finding things much easier—and then they made if free...It displaced a hierachical organization (cf. Yahoo's (still extant!) example) arranged by respected experts that more closely resembled the library's Dewey Decimal System or Linneaus' taxonomy than anything that we'd now call search. You can perform pretty much the same analysis for Google Apps, Google Chrome, Android, and, now, the Google OS. Those are all fulcrum points that give Google (and Google's user) additional leverage as we shift the weight of the past. With Google OS that point is very near the center of gravity of the opposing paradigm.... The point here is not that Google does NOT have want to "beat" Microsoft (or Apple or Linux) at any of these tasks. It will be sufficient for the purpose if the new browser or operationg system forces a shift on the rest of the field. It will be quite alright with Google, I suspect, if MS beats them in the browser war as long as the winners all support HTML 5-Ajax-multiple threading and the like. Google will have won if its Apps—and similar web applications that rely solely on nonproprietary foundations—run beautifully on all browsers. It is investing in winning the war; not the battles.
If Microsoft, or Apple, or Linux responds to a Google OS with popular instant-on, secure, web-centric OSs and Google's dies a slow and embarrassing death the larger battle will have been won. And, for my money, that is the most likely outcome. Google to date has done an amazing job of creating the ecology in which it can thrive. Google Search made an impossible-to-navigate complexity suddenly usable—and that encouraged the myriad of small, eccentric, impossible-to-classify sources to find an audience and thrive. That in turn made search ever more dominant and gave Google search the page views it needed to thrive through even the lightest-weight advertising. The old hierarchical web was designed by and for graduate students. The new searchable web is usable by almost anyone who has a vague idea of how a topic is discussed.
Now, back to the topic
Google is leveraging the brutal fact of efficiency, its method is so much more cheaper per person than the oldr way that it can afford to give us significant services for free. We do waste enormous amounts of processor cycles and memory storage. The current system is inefficient by design: We buy memory to store our copy of a file stored (but not easily accessible) in a myriad of other places. How much space do you devote to browser cache alone? We purchase computers with several times the processor power necessary to do what used to be called supercomputing (and was illegal to export only a decade ago). Indeed, much current supercomputer design is consists basically of hooking up many personal computers or even game consoles together through a very fast network. We only very occasionally need the enormous power that is at our fingertips in the current personal computer. Web-based apps and systems do not need to waste anything like that amount of firepower. The difficult, processor-intensive tasks can be done on the web. The big storage can be on the web.
The web is, or can be conceived of as, a big, oddly configured computer. It's got great memory and a great, if wildly distributed, CPU. And it can be radically cheaper to use because of those facts.
But...
The Catch But, the catch is that the web is great computer that has lousy and expensive I/O by comparison. It is only the beginning of a great computer. You have to be a touch geeky to recognize all three parts of a computer...memory, cpu, and I/O. We are sold computers and parts on the basis of memory and CPU speed; not I/O. I/O is code for input/output. It defines what sort of and, crucially, at what speed, information can flow in and out of the computer. On your personal computer I/O is seldom a bottleneck and its expense trivial. Not so for the web where the I/O is the network itself. On the web I/O IS the bottleneck, always.
Most of Google's initiatives can be conceived of as trying to find ways to minimize the effect of the webs' I/O bottleneck. When we hear talk about running faster or yielding a better user experience that is what is typically where the real bottleneck is. Google Apps, Google Gears, Google Chrome, the Google OS and more are all shaped by getting more out of a slow and expensive connection. They've bee surprisingly successful. (The idea that you can do good word processing over the web is really pretty shocking.) The Google OS is merely the latest and potentially most powerful way to evade that constraint and keep that huge weight moving.
But, really, it's all a sad hack.
Google needs Lafayette, and Amsterdam and Vasteras and.... What Google really needs is for everyone to have better, much better, bandwidth. And damn near no latency too, while you're at it. Google needs Lafayette, and Amsterdam, and Vasteras and every other local fibered-up high-bandwidth network in the world as testbeds to showcase what is really possible. It (and others) need a place with no I/O constraint, with a network that has the quality to take advantage of the infrastructure that it is building and surely wants to extend. It needs to build an on-network cache and server system to explore how it can use a decent I/O network to compliment its current products and develop new ones. It needs real communities to really test those new ideas. (Like Google Wave, which could be launched today in a place with real bandwidth.) Google is creating the conditions for the next big shift. It'd be a pity if like xxx it moved the world only to find that the effort had left in a place where others benefited first and most.
If Google's attempts to move the system can be understood as trying to shift the fulcrum to give them more leverage, promoting big-bandwidth communities might well be likened to making the lever longer...that is what most needs to be changed to really shift the old world to a new place. And Lafayette just might provide that crucial place to stand and use that longer lever.
Lafayette is a special case... because Lafayette is a campus—it provides 100 mbps of speed, with amazingly low latency, between every household it connects. It's hard to overstate the value of that. What make most great networks less great is, ironically in this context, network effects. In most cases network effects are good [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Network_effect.png] things...the value of your phone connection only increases when your neighbors also get one. But if your network is great and other networks that contain the people you want to contact are not then the added value of what you get from a great network is seriously diminished. So Google, with its large suite of apps that emphasize interaction finds it difficult to find a population that has a large enough population to use its products who all have the same fortunate circumstance. Even networks, like Verizon's here in the United States, which have some higher bandwidth tiers sell mostly lower bandwidth tiers. And they do NOT give their customers large bandwidth between themselves. These networks do not form a cohesive pool of high-bandwidth users.
Lafayette's will.
And, wait, there's more! What Vasteras teaches us is that a high-bandwidth community can flip from having most of its traffic connect to places outside of the local community to making most of its connections inside its own network. Various reporters say that 70% to 80% of Vasteras' traffic is internal. That really shouldn't surprise us; it has happened before. When the first phone networks were built they were conceived of as substitutes for the long-distance telegraph and few thought their use would extend beyond the business world. In short order, of course, it became apparent that the people we actually want to talk to are right down the street; those are the people we know. Phone traffic is, and has been for a long time, mostly local and the widespread adoption much less expensive long distance calling has not changed that.
There is no reason to think that a more robust network, one that is rich in ways to communicate will not follow a similar pattern. People want to communicate and trade information with each other, not someone far away.
Lafayette et al. needs Google Google can make the local network truly valuable, it can significantly erase the negative weight of the old network by locating caches and services on the local network. Local networks like Lafayette's need that support to make their own business case. Such networks would be wise to court Google (and many others, Google here stands for the new web aborning) and to suport the company in its efforts. A partnership would be of enormous value to both sides. And would help in shifting that weight.
So..... There's a major shift underway; it's hard not to feel everything straining toward that change. But a single constraint keeps the current edifice from falling: Bandwidth. Kick out that constraint and the new web comes into its own. Quickly. There are a few places where that bandwidth constraint is not in place. Those are the places where, with a little judicious midwifery, the new web could be born. And Lafayette shows how the initial densely interconnected communities that would kick-start the process could be developed.
It is a dream. But it is just barely beyond our grasp.
There's going to be a "floor raising" for Lafayette Commons tomorrow at 6:00 PM in the new Southside Library. (6101 Johnston St—map) You're Invited!
The event will be a floor raising in two senses:
first, it will introduce a project that hopes to raise the floor for the people of Lafayette: to make a common set of sophisticated tools available to everyone free of charge;
second, the meeting will be the first step in a community barn raising: it will gather users, programmers, admin types, and content producers in one place with to advance the project by laying down the floor....
A bit more:
Lafayette Commons is currently built on an Education Edition of Google Apps. Apps is a pretty shockingly sophisticated platform giving free access to an intergrated suite of email, calandering, word processing, spreadsheet, chat, web-building, and video apps. You get online storage to the tune of 8 gigs. With the Education Edition comes complete access to the APIs and the ability to alter them or bring in new modules or extensions. Each account comes with its own personalized start page giving quick access to your basic functions (like email, calendar, or docs). The start page also offers access to thousands of specialized "widgets" that winnow out the wealth of information availabel on the web; Lafayette Commons will host and encourage specialized Lafayette-centric widgets focusing on subjects ranging from crime and traffic to weather and local events.
A list of those interested in the "floor raising" will include:
Users of all stripes,
Nonprofits—cheap, sophisticated, cross platform tools should especially appeal to them
Programmers eager to learn something new and help out their community
Content providers who want their content in front of the public; from local government to the news, to events producers
Volunteers wanting to help bring folks up to speed or administer the site functions
In short, we're looking for you.
(There's an online invite too...if you'd like to get your very own personal invitation check the web page out and ask there. Similarly, if you can't make the floor raising, but are interested check the invite and follow out the clicks for that option.)
Well, I'm about to take off for the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington DC. That'll explain any upcoming odd missives posted from D.C. :-)
The agenda is great—and the conversations in the lobby even better. (Organizer David Isenberg-—yes, that Isenberg—explains the theme of this year's conference quite nicely.) If you have an interest in the internet and public policy and ever get a chance to go you really ought show up. I hope to visit with good people, a few of which occasionally read this blog, and soak up a some bright approaches to my most recent interest: Lafayette Commons.
(Oh yeah: Lafayette will be well represented...Terry Huval will present on our Fiber to the Home project. David has been a stauch supporter.)
FOF (Friend of Fiber ;-) ) Brent Faul dropped me a note this morning, saying:
Hi John,
I've been reading your blog since you put it up during the ramp up to the fiber vote. It's been great and I've appreciated your work mightily. I know that you've been connected for a couple of weeks now and I've only seen one brief single sentence comment about your experience with the service. It's so uncharacteristic of you not to comment on it in detail that I find the silence kind of deafening, if you know what I mean. Should I be worried? Is there a fly in the ointment?
I couldn't help but ask!
Thanks, Brent Faul
It's a damn good question...and makes me realize that a number of other people have asked the same indirectly. Paint me chagrined.
Short answer: The service is GREAT.
Long story short: Everything works as I expected/hoped. Nothing to comment on there. The phone has few extra fun frills over the bare bones AT&T line I had. No more weird fax noises and rings that signal nothing but a dead line. The TV service has all the stuff I ever watch and is absolutely crystal clear. The internet, which is the biggest change by far, is blazingly fast and is shifting the way that my wife and I spend our time. More time on the laptops, we watch more video online, and we are looking more web-based streaming video on the TV screen now that we get a smooth uninterrupted play. In short: it realized my every expectation. No big deal. :-) I will sometime soon get around to doing a more fun, tiresomely exhaustive set of reviews of the various services as they currently exist...now that I have been appropriately prodded.
But that sorta begs the question of why I didn't dive right in...Well for one thing, I do tend to want to do a thorough take once...and I am still setting up the system to my tastes, rewiring my house and generally keeping things so in flux up that I don't have a stable experience on which to comment. But also, as I told FOF Brent:
1) I was never all that interested in the services. Still am not. The internet side is awful cool and the speeds are very, very nice... but the TV, online stuff, and phone just work. That's nifty. They work great. But they are not exciting (to me :-) ) —Most of what I want to explore that is personally exciting is how I can use things differently because the internet speed lets me do things differently. And it does! Very gratifying. But I am still trying to figure out just exactly how. (I can report that we watch fewer TV shows and surf more...but am discovering that some stuff that I formerly considered internet stuff is now watched on the big screen.)
2) What always interested me most was the way that having community-owned fiber could enhance our community as well as our individual lives. To that end I am distracted from posting on the fiber services by trying to work on a concept we're calling Lafayette Commons — to provide a higher base-level of tools and capacities to folks here in Lafayette. We're starting with a nonprofit Education Edition of Google apps that allows us complete access to the API's, a very localizable widget-based landing page, and the complete suite of Google productivity tools (email, storage, word processing, site construction, spreadsheet, etc. with very nice collaborative functions like intercommunication and version tracking). This can be distributed free to basically an unlimited number of users. To Lafayette.
Lafayette Commons is in what I'm calling "in Delta" in sly reference to the software "in Beta" concept --the tools are pretty much there which distinguishes it from the usual unfinished beta release, but what is not clear is the "delta," the "change" we want to effect. We need a nice big stable of visionaries and practical-minded "project wranglers" to create and localize appropriate tools and interface. This is such a tangle that it is very distracting. (In, admittedly, a fun way.)
Interested?
Anyhow, Yes I should really do a series of posts on the services available and hopefully soon...but I am going to a conference in DC (Freedom To Connect, F2C) late this/early next week that I hope will refresh me in helpful ways so I doubt that it will all get done this week.
Thanks for the prod, John
And thanks, folks out there, for your patience...and to any intrigued by Lafayette Commons...please get in touch we need lots of people doing lots of different things.
LUS Fiber is going to be promoted tomorrow in an international venue tomorrow....Right off Pinhook. ;-)
The IEEE Virtual Reality conference is being held in Lafayette this year—a big win for Lafayette's international reputation in that rarified space. LITE and the people there are surely much of what brought them here...but LUS Fiber is also a selling point used to demonstrate that our city is a tech venue even if it isn't off a major international airport.
Terry Huval will be presenting on LUS Fiber to this group--and interested local tech types--at Tech South's reception tomorrow evening. It's open to the public and if you haven't heard about it through one of the myriad lists that has publicized it you're invited too...bop on over to the Eventbrite page and register. I, for one am curious as to what Terry has to say to this crowd. My guess is that it won't be the same talk I heard at the League of Women Voters. ;-)
And, by the way, I'm going to give a five minute bit on Lafayette Commons...asking for help in both the vision and the tech implementation departments in order to make a nice set of tools freely available to the community. And provide a commercial-free platform for further development.
Every once in an while I put up something that is more for chewing on in the context of Lafayette and Fiber than it is on those topics directly. Sunday Thoughts. Food for Thought. Those are the usual tags long-time readers will have noticed. Today the pointer is to a new bit from Kevin Kelly; an intellectual hero of sorts for me.
Kevin Kelly has changed his mind about Wikipedia. It works. Most folks that "knew anything" knew it wouldn't work. Kelly knew it wouldn't work. And knew why. He, and they, were wrong. I think a lot of folks have made that admission. But few are as rigorously self-critical as Kelly. He tries to understand which of the assumptions that he brought to the table mislead him—and asks what other judgments of his might be based on those now-disproven assumptions.
His conclusion about Wikipedia:
How wrong I was. The success of the Wikipedia keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
This makes Kelly—who calls himself an individualist with a deeper sense of what that means than most—rethink his individualism and ask if there is a new and desirable sort of community emerging:
The Wikipedia has changed my mind, a fairly steady individualist, and lead me toward this new social sphere. I am now much more interested in both the new power of the collective, and the new obligations stemming from individuals toward the collective. In addition to expanding civil rights, I want to expand civil duties. I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.
That's what it's done for me.
Read carefully this post points to the way that Wikipedia's basic structure, its architecture, its rules, its algorithmic frame, encourage real, competent, participation and discourage and make inconsequential sabotage and ignorance. You just don't need a controlling hierarchy if you get the architecture right. It turns out that the "undo" command might be a critical social invention, or at least that's the way I read it. Maybe that('s why we should prefer a digital world. Wanna know what "undo" has to do with it? Read the article. It's well worth it.)
That's really interesting. And maybe it's something that is not only interesting globally but locally—here in Lafayette. We here in this little place will have the monster bandwidth of our generous intranet connection (100 megs or more to all!—locally) and the absurdly cheap storage that comes with our era. What can we do with big storage and unthrottled bandwidth—more what can we do that is worth doing? We on LPF, and the Lafayette Digital Divide Committee, have floated the idea of a Lafayette Commons—a deliberately vague notion about a site that would aggregate information and provide on-network resources to our community. Now our community doesn't need an encyclopedia...it needs something more focused on local needs, local events, and local, timely knowledge. We need to know what's going on down the block, who is hot in the local bar scene, what the real skivvy is on the district four councilman's connections, how to get funding for a new pocket park...and a lot of other things that I can't but you can imagine. The knowledge and understanding is out there. It is only getting the architecture of making it accessible right that stands in the way of our turning an amazingly fast and cheap local infrastructure into a something really valuable.
And it might be that Wikipedia—and a new generation that thinks Wikipedia is normal—is worth learning from. Kelly remarks:
When you grow up knowing rather than admitting that such a thing as the Wikipedia works; when it is obvious to you that open source software is better; when you are certain that sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them — then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the commonwealth.
What sort of common wealth could we create? If we can just get the architecture right.
2007 was the year Lafayette's fiber project emerged from the wilderness and people began to dream in earnest. The final delaying lawsuit was dismissed, the bonds sold, and contracts let for construction. Dreams followed the announcement of intriguing new features like a wireless addition and the 100 megs of intranet bandwidth and people began to dream of what we might do with it it to close the digital divide or provide new ways to strengthen the community.
January........ At the year's beginning we were still awaiting a decision from the State Supreme Court on the last lawsuit holding up the bond sale. The Fiber to the Schools project advanced, ensuring a parish-wide fiber backbone and early hints of a wireless project were realized when LUS put out a bid for a municipal wireless network — one initially designed to provide government services. The competition was clearly still out there as Cox introduced Video On Demand, upping the ante on what Lafayette's network needed to provide in its initial offerings.
February........ In early February Durel's "State of the City" address lauded the fiber build but failed to slake our appetite for new news on the wireless component. The Advertiser's attempt to move into an internet-centric future advanced in fits and starts but it emerged with arguably the best local video site in town, far outclassing the efforts of the local TV stations and proving that with the construction of new net-based infrastructure the race will not necessarily go to the established incumbents. An attempt to resuscitate the breathless prose of the fiber fight fell flat at the Advertiser as a story about the cost of defending ourselves against the incumbents produced no discernible ripple of concern from a populace immunized against such sensationalism by the long fiber battle.
Late in the month, after weeks of waiting, came the Supreme Court decision we'd been waiting—and hoping—for. The Court unanimously overturned the 3rd Circuit's ruling and pretty roundly spanked them for their mistakes in letting the argument go on for so long. The final victory for Lafayette was widely heralded as one that would have consequences in locales beyond Lafayette or Louisiana. Cox, after years of vigorous attempts to delay or destroy the project, testily denied that it made any difference to them. Dreaming about what we could do with the shiny new toy starts almost immediately and LUS announced plans to solicit ideas from the community.
March........ The first, and in retrospect apparently last, of the Fiber Forums is held and the community had plenty of ideas. (Cox and AT&T also attended and took conspicuously copious notes.) If nothing else the forum demonstrated that the LUS understood that a generous attitude will pay unanticipated dividends. And that simple insight is one which will do more to make the system a success than any elaborate business plan. Wireless hopes, big intranet bandwidth, symmetrical speeds and more were all promised and their implications discussed.
An old issue, the digital divide, returned, Lafayette was named a "Smart Community," and the first high paying jobs attracted by the fiber arrived. LUS started to spend visible money on the networks construction, selecting a design firm to lay out plans for the headend building that would house the electronics and for a warehouse to store the masses of equipment that would be needed in the construction phase.
April........ April brought a shower of small advances. The Digital Divide Committee was reconvened, the location of the headend facility at the intersection of I-10 and I-49 was set, and an engineer to oversee the construction and help make crucial decisions was chosen.
May....... March brought a reblooming of the old FUD tactics from the incumbent corporations. Cox kicked off the festival with an embarrassing attempt to pretend its hybrid fiber-coax network was a fiber network in a venue where everyone knew better. Just a bit later we got a whiff of old push poll tactics when a new, apparently limited version was trialed in Lafayette. Then Naquin's (AT&T's PR team?) attorneys carried water for the incumbents by engaging in a rather transparently false threat to sue LUS just a week before the city went to New York to interview for the crucial bond ratings.
June........ As the seasons turned Huval went to Councilor William's "Real Talk" and talked—about the retail wireless plans, about a faster construction schedule, about a larger basic cable lineup than anticipated, about internet speeds where the slowest package would be faster than the fastest speeds available in most of the country. Oh yeah, and symmetrical bandwidth coupled with a 100 meg intranet. Enough to leave the most ardent proponent breathless. Lafayette Pro Fiber floated a dream about a "Lafayette Commons" that would take our commonly owned network and use it to make a place to share local information build community.
The bond sale was authorized and the bonds were put on the market. The first unit sold solidified the legal standing of the entire business plan since bond holders are constitutionally protected from any change in the plan no future legal challenges to the basic plan can be successful.
July....... In July LUS' Huval was honored by his national peers—he was both given an achievement award and made the chairman of the board of the American Public Power Association. The success of the fiber fight clearly raised his stock nationally as well as locally. The bond sale closed; meaning the money was in the bank and available to spend. The newly hired engineer's men were in the field surveying poles—making sure there was plenty of room for the fiber to be hung.
August........ Joey Durel took over leadership of the Louisiana Municipal and pledged to work "to give local governments more ability to control their own destinies while not placing roadblocks in the way of our progress." Among other things, that probably referred to the infamous imposition by the legislature of the (un)Fair Competition Act. An LMA with aware leadership will fight such laws. The City-Parish Council approved the fiber funding plan. Dreaming about what might well turn out to be the nation's best telecom system continued apace and a new Digital Divide report was made to the council.
September....... Another small media tempest erupted as the kids headed back to school. The headend building came in way over budget and LUS had to scale back and issue a new set of specs to keep its price under control. The headend was one in a series of public projects whose price spiraled upwards in the wake of Lafayette's post-Katrina/Rita building boom.
Cox fired its most effective shot yet across the bow of LUS by securing a long-term contract with ULL athletics for exclusive rights to telecast replays of coaches programs, sporting events and university athletic programs on its cable systems—and we can rest assured they'll not be reselling such valuable material to the local opposition. For ULL fans this is a very big deal—such deals have lead to a lot of fan anger on both coasts where such deals are more common.
The Advertiser endorsed the dreams of bridging the digital divide in a supportive editorial and Huval spoke up on Federal broadband policy in his role of APPA chair saying plainly that the incumbent telecom corporations had failed American in spite of massive subsidies and called for letting "the public sector take the reins in communities where citizens want them to do so."
October........ Dreaming of a better wireless network provided a bit of fun in October. The surprise announcement that LUS would imitate Apple and open its own "fiber storefront" to educate and promote the brand was greeted with approval. And the construction news rolled on with Alcatel being picked to provide the electronic guts of Lafayette's new system.
November........ LUS signed a franchise agreement with the city-parish that was virtually a copy of Cox's and immediately tried to reassure folks during its approval that the agreement wasn't nearly all they hoped to provide the community. One of the few areas where LUS laid out a plan in their franchise agreement for going beyond what Cox had already done was in its support of AOC, the local access channel. That touched of some dreaming about what a 21st century AOC might really look like. Mike weighed in with some dreams about an asynchronous Lafayette in which AOC or a surrogate would play a major role.
If history repeated itself with the franchise agreement, an awareness of the recent fiber battle seemed completely missing from the minds of some candidates for the state representative seats up for grabs this year. Let's hope their more aware colleagues educate them as to what a successful telecommunications utility could mean for the hopes and dreams of their community.
December........ As the year wound down toward the holiday season the bid on the revamped fiber headend was accepted and the crews were spotted in a North Lafayette neighborhood moving wires on poles in preparation for hanging fiber.
The future is upon us. Since the plan is to light up a section of the city somewhere near the first of the coming year, with any luck next year's edition of this missive will be able to say that fiber has been lit up in Lafayette and that we no longer need to wait for the future.
A Wired blog sez that a $200 Ubuntu Linux PC, sans monitor is now available in Lafayette.
Cool. And it's especially great for Lafayette.
Why great for Lafayette?
This computer and its software packages come very close to being exactly the computer that the Lafayette Digital Divide Committee recommended in the "Bridging the Digital Divide" document.
That study, which became official policy when it was made an ordinance by the city-parish council, recommended a mix of low cost computers, free open source software, and a local portal/server that leveraged the intranet bandwidth the committee recommended LUS make available to its customers. Let's take a look at how that has played out:
The key, and hardest, part of that equation was securing the use of full intranet bandwidth—when the committee first recommended Lafayette adopt that policy there was real doubt that it was technically feasible. In short order such doubt was dispelled. Since that time LUS and the city-parish has fully committed to providing at least 100 megs of intranet bandwidth to every user regardless of how much they spend for internet connectivity. Huval and LUS call this "peer to peer bandwidth." With 100 megs locally available to all users a rich local portal and aggressive use of server-based applications becomes possible. Since much of the computing and handling of large quantities of data can be handled on the network rather than in the users personal computer much less powerful—and hence less expensive—computers can be used.
That brings us back to the subject of todays post: Everex's TC2502 gPC computer. This 'puter is available through WalMart for $200 dollars and Wired's blog carries of list of locations that will stock it that include Lafayette. It is also available over the net from WalMart's online store. It is sold without a monitor but includes mouse, keyboard and a set of speakers. The desktop computer runs a variant of the free Ubuntu Linux operating system called gOS. Also free is a list of installed open source software including OpenOffice, Firefox web browser, Meebo IM, and Skype, GIMP photo software, the Xing DVD and video player, and Rhythmbox music management software. Even more interesting for local digital divide promoters is that it includes icons linking to Google applications like Mail, Documents, Spreadsheets, Calendar, News, and Maps.
Between LUS' solid commitment to lower prices for connectivity (which is now more important than computer cost as a barrier to adoption) Google's online apps, and the emergence of commercially available, low-cost, open source computers like this Everex, the pieces are falling in place for Lafayette to have a digital divide program that will be as unique as the system itself.
A report from the Advertiser presents an overview of the speakers on "technology and knowledge economy" at a Chamber breakfast at the Petroleum Club (a location redolent of the old rather than the new economy). The Advertiser's Bob Moser leads with the money qoute:
Lafayette has put itself in a great position to lead the future "technology and knowledge economy," a Mississippi economic leader told a local business crowd on Thursday.
Randall Goldsmith, head of the Mississippi Technology Alliance, was the leadoff in a session that also featured Lafayette's Ramesh Kolluru, Keith Thibodeaux, and Doug Menefee.
The Reality I was pleased to see some positive discussion of the essential role of the University in any hope Lafayette business might have of riding the technology wave. Not mincing words: I am often appalled at the dismissive attitude that I find pervasive in the Lafayette business community regarding the role of ULL as the engine of tech growth. Put plainly, without ULL there would be not tech be a sector in Lafayette. There is no hope of staying ahead of the curve without the academics. They are the essential players. It really is that simple and a Chamber breakfast that seems to treat that as a given is a great relief.
LONI and LITE were apparently the focus of discussion and both, of course, are academic ventures. (Again: without ULL neither could exist—and more pointedly neither would have even been conceived.) LITE will need careful, tolerant, encouragement from the local community. It is a new concept and is a tool rather than a product to boot; as such it so will take time to develop its niche. (Impatient parties should review the rocky early history of Baton Rouge's Pennington Biomedical Center and consider what the consequence would have been if Baton Rouge's business leaders had demanded immediate, local payback in terms of focusing on fostering old-style local private medical practices and hospitals in Greater Baton Rouge. —It would have destroyed what has become an outstanding world-class asset.) In a similar vein LONI—and its connections to Internet2/LamdaRail, are all fundamentally academic interconnects. It is a creature which, will benefit a larger community but not something that would exist as an asset for Louisiana or Lafayette if it hadn't been created by the Universities.
It goes without saying, or should, that without the private and governmental sectors actively and passionately involved the possibilities that ULL offers the community cannot be realized. They, too, are essential. But no one should mistake the reality: while a strong business community and a wise government are central to Lafayette's growth they could not create the resource that is represented by ULL; they could, however, fail to take advantage of it.
Oddly in my view, the "technology and knowledge economy" event did not include a focus on the most significant (academic or non-academic) initiative in the city—and arguably the very one that will have the greatest immediate impact on the ability of Chamber members to compete from a position on the high ground with their national and international opposition: the LUS Fiber project. That project will provide a ground-breaking 100 or more megs of intranet connection to every citizen who signs on—and that could easily be 50 or more percent of the market. Young and old, poor and rich, white and black, Creole, Cajun, French, and Americain. It will be coupled with a state-of the art wireless network that will actually work. It will all be available in the least expensive parts of the city to large, small, tiny entrepreneurs and regular folks who, if they so chose to grasp it, will have bandwidth previously available only in to mega corps and university campuses. What will we do with all that? Who knows? But rest assured that the vacuum will be filled. Why no mention? What's up with that sort of blind spot?...The really interesting discussion would have been of how to leverage this uniquely Lafayette convergence of the muscle of private initiative, municipal community-mindedness, and the restless exploratory energy of Academia to benefit the community.
The Potential It would be pretty easy to imagine a research project that encourages ULL professors to develop an expertise in the popular use of really large bandwidth. It would involve both social and technical research and would draw in artists, playwrights, and mulitmedia folks of all strips in testing content. It's the sort of research project with tentacles into every department that a first-rank research 1 University would salivate over. But none of them have the essential resource. Consider: Lafayette will shortly have more bandwidth in the hands of a larger number of people of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and incomes than any place in the country. It is going to be the richest feedbed of data imaginable for next generation theorizing and practice in disciplines ranging from networking to interface design; from multimedia art to interactive theater. Properly designed and funded such a program would attract top-notch, ground-breaking young scholars to ULL in numbers sufficient to make the university a national center in a field of interdisciplinary studies it, and Lafayette, could create.
An element in making such a push credible to an outside world that sees Louisiana through the lens of the White Citizens Council and the Jena 6 would be a real digital divide initiative and a strong, community-backed program to encourage every citizen to make the fullest possible use of the potential of the new network. With public, private, and university backing Lafayette could find itself among the Austins' and Research Triangles' of the US: places where people come and want to stay in order to build something special that they could build nowhere else. Dell Computer is an engine in Austin (and the US) becaue a student wanted to earn some extra cash and explore what he'd learned in school and for very little other substantial reason. That Hollywood is all but synonymous with riches worldwide is not due to any natural advantage but to an accident of history.
We could create such an accident here.
The real potential of such an open collaboration between the public, private, and university sectors would be in the spin-offs, the Dells, the Steve Jobs—the companies marketing the "inconsequential" by-products of new fields in the form of new services offered by drop-outs and folks who don't want to leave but have gained new, almost unique skills and put them to productive use. Texas poured its oil revenues into academics and, along the way, into a "far-out" and esoteric "computer science" department back in the days when the internet was a gleam in a researchers eye. An orthodonist's kid who showed up intending to become a doctor got hooked, got his hands dirty, and decided to drop out to really do this stuff. Dell Computer and a high-tech industry in dusty then-backwater Austin was the payback. That sector alone will return its investment many times long after the last oil is pumped from the sands beneath Texas.
Today's Advertiser runs two stories (1, 2) that are both interesting and informative on the gap in computer and internet usage between seniors and the rest of the community.
The gap between seniors and the rest of the population is one of the most marked divides in internet usage—and one remarked upon by Lafayette's own digital divide committee. Today's article documents the divide and notes the narrowing of the gap over the years:
In a study conducted for The Daily Advertiser this spring, 36 percent of those over 65 who responded said they had accessed the Internet in the past 30 days. That figure was 33 percent for a 7-day period in question. Those numbers are significantly lower than any other age group, but even that represents a marked increase over 2001 (8 percent) and 2005 (22 percent) for the 7-day response.
That clearly documents a divide--and an improvement over time. What's really great about this is that it is local data. (Something we very badly need.) Lafayette is unique enough that I've never been confident that the national stats applied very directly. National trendlines are easier to show confidence in but even that makes the old statistician in me a little uneasy—so it is very nice to get better data. The little bit of data given here documents a healthy change over time.
Interestingly this summer, PEW's well-respected periodic surveys of internet usage documents a very similar number —32%—for seniors "using the internet at least occasionally." That sort of phrasing is likely to overestimate usage; the Advertiser's asking if a respondent has used it in the last week is a more reliable and tougher question—and it showed 33%. So while a completely parallel question would be ideal the Advertisers data is still a good indication that Lafayette's seniors do not lag the national average and most probably are using the internet in a bit higher numbers.
We're used to thinking of ourselves as behind the ball in Louisiana but apprently that isn't true of senior internet usage. At least not in Lafayette. Why not? Part of the answer might be visible in the subtitle of the first story: "Classes help some step into computer age." Folks at the university and at the public library have been making education available in a consistent and useful manner. Some organizations that appeal to the elderly, like genealogical ones, are also touting the advantages to interested seniors. All that has to add up.
Of course, as nice as education is, it still leaves more seniors offline than any other category. Arguably seniors with limited mobility, a larger interaction with the trappings of officialdom, and a more persistent need for good medical information would benefit more than the youngsters from internet connectivity. It would be nice to increase their utilization. The second story, "Why getting grandma online matters," points to the more fundamental problem: showing people who've gotten along without the internet for the whole of a very fruitful life why they ought to want to bother. The story lists activities that make the value evident:
Sharing photos with family and friends.
Free medical information is available.
Shop without leaving home.
Apply for certain benefits.
You know, when you think about it those are the sorts of things we all find interest--that and staying in touch with friends and our community more generally.
What would help seniors begin to take advantage of the resources are pretty much what would help us all. We ALL would benefit from being better connected to our communities. That's what the idea of a Lafayette Commons, an online place that makes useful local information easy to access is all about. Worth thinking on.
Google, the US' premier internet company, is testing new designs for its search page and its igoogle homepage...bu only in places where big bandwidth is available. According to a PC World article Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president of technology, said:
"We're actually now experimenting with trying new kinds of homepages, for example in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, that are a completely different type than we've tried before on our U.S. site...
"We think [the new design] will be more appropriate for the local cultures, and their context, and their broadband connections, which, for example in Korea, are extraordinarily fast," Brin said, adding that response to the new site designs had been "quite positive."
Google has been famous for NOT crowding its basic search page with extraneous (and self-serving) ads or cross-promotions. As a consequence their search page has a reputation for loading quickly and cleanly. Apparently, having gobs of extra bandwidth encourages Google to experiment with changes that include animated icons though the additions are still modest by anyone else's standards. (Check out the Korean search page.)
Google's user homepage system, iGoogle, gets an upgrade in faster places as well. Tabbed "gadget boxes" are a staple of the new design in fiber-rich locales and small animated graphics are featured as well. (Taiwan's)
iGoogle has fascinated me for awhile now. It is similar to a system envisioned nearly 3 years ago by Lafayette's Digital Divide Committee as a way to make localized information available and to allow users to customize the page by choosing the modules they were interested in. In that vision you could get the feed from your church, or the sports feed, or find local computer repair or babysitters... The hope was encourage more extensive use of modern networks by making the net more useful for local tasks. Back then it was pretty much a pipe dream. Each box on the page (what Google calls a gadget) would have been pretty much handbuilt and the whole system would have to have been backed up with a locally created and maintained server and programming team. Changing the box's placement on the page columns would have to have been mediated by an awkward panel. It's amazing how fast the future comes in some areas: with the maturation of RSS feeds and the arrival of easy to use tools like Yahoo Pipes and Google Gadgets that project is now conceivable as something a single competent programmer (or a determined neophyte) could tinker together using those tools and end up with a very sophisticated face that would include drag and drop rearrangement of the page and multiple personal pages for different purposes—you could have a separate local tabs for "local news," "kids stuff," "my sports," and "business stuff."
Lafayette could use the nifty extra features iGoogle uses in Asia for a sporty new local website. And with the coming bandwidth from LUS it could easily match the speeds available there.
Maybe someone could ask Google if they need an US testbed?
(Thanks to Mike who suggested the link—and the title. :-))
Warning: this is seriously different from the usual fare here but fits roughly into my occasional "Sunday Thought" posts. I've been thinking hard about how to make the web more compelling for users and especially how to integrate the local interests that seem so weakly represented on the internet. As part of that exploration I ran across a research program labeled "PhotoSynth." It offers a way to integrate "place" into the abstract digital world of the web in a pretty compelling way if your interest is in localism: it automatically recreates a 3 dimensional world from any random set of photographs of a scene and allows tags and links to be embedded in them. Once anyone has tagged a local feature (say the fireman's statue on Vermillion St. or a associated a review with a picture of Don's Seafood downtown.) everyone else's images are, in effect, enriched by their ability to "inherit" that information.
But it seems that it is a lot more than just the best thing to happen to advocates of web localism in a long time. It's very fundamental stuff, I think, with implications far beyond building a better local web portal.... Read On...
---------------------------- Photosynth aka "Photo Tourism" encapsulates a couple of ideas that are well worth thinking hard about. Potentially this technical tour de force provides a new, automated, and actually valuable way of building representations of the world we live in.
This is a big deal.
Before I get all abstract on you (as I am determined to do) let me strongly encourage you to first take a look at the most basic technical ideas behind what I'm talking about. Please take the time to absorb a five and a half minute video illustrating the technology. If you're more a textural learner you can take a quick look at the text-based, photo-illustrated overview from the Washington State/MS lab. But I recommend trying the video first.
You did that? Good; thanks....otherwise the rest will be pretty opaque—more difficult to understand than it needs to be.
One way to look at what the technology does is that it recreates a digitized 3D world from a 2D one. It builds a fully digital 3D model of the world from multiple 2D photos. Many users contribute their "bits" of imagery and, together, they are automatically interlinked to yield, out of multiple points of view, a "rounded" representation of the scene. The linkages between images are established on the basis of data inside the image--on the basis of their partial overlap—and ultimately on the basis of their actually existing next to each other—and this is done without the considered decisions of engaged humans.
Why is that a big deal?
Because its not all handmade. Today's web is stunningly valuable but it is also almost completely hand-made. Each image or word is purpose-chosen for its small niche on a web page or in its fragment of context. The links that connect the web's parts are (for the most part) hand-crafted as well and represent someone's thoughtful decision. Attempts to automate the construction of the web, to automatically create useful links, have failed miserably—largely because connections need to be meaningful in terms of the user's purpose and algorithms don't grok meaning or purpose.
The web has been limited by its hand-crafted nature. There is information (of all sorts, from videos of pottery being thrown, to bird calls, to statistical tables) out there we can't get to—or even get an indication that we ought to want to get to. We rely mostly on links to find as much as we do and those rely on people making the decision to hand-craft them. But we don't have the time, or the inclination, to make explicit and machine-readable all the useful associations that lend meaning to what encounter in our lives. So the web remains oddly thin—it consists of the few things that are both easy enough and inordinately important enough to a few of our fellows to get represented on the net. It is their overwhelming number and the fact that we are all competent in our own special domains that makes the web so varied and fascinating.
You might think that web search, most notably the big success story of the current web, Google's, serves as a ready substitute for consciously crafted links. We think Google links us to appropriate pages without human intervention. But we're not quite right—Google's underlying set of algorithms, collectively known as "PageRank," mostly just ranks pages by reference to how many other pages link to those pages and weights those by the links form other sites that those pages receive...and so on. To the extent that web search works it relies on making use of handmade links. The little fleas algorithm.™ It's handmade links all the way down.
Google was merely the first to effectively repackage human judgment. You've heard of web 2.0? (More) The idea that underpins that widely hyped craze is that you can go to your users to supply the content, the meaning, the links. That too is symptomatic of what I'm trying to point to here: the model that relies solely on the web being built by "developers" who are guessing their users needs has reached its limits.
That's why Web 2.0 is a big deal: The folks designing the web are groping toward a realization of their limits, how to deal with them, and keep the utility of the web growing.
It is against that backdrop that PhotoSynth appears. It represents another path toward a richer web. The technologies it uses have been combined to contextually indexes images based on their location in the real, physical world. The physical world becomes its own index—one that exist independently of hand-crafted links. Both Google and Yahoo have been looking for a way to harness "localism," recognizing that they are missing a lot of what is important to users by not being able to locate places, events, and things that are close to the user's physical location.
The new "physical index" would quickly become intertwined with the meaning-based web we have developed. Every photo that you own would, once correlated with the PhotoSynth image, "inherit" all the tags and links embedded in all the other imagery there or nearby. More and more photos are tagged with meta-data and sites like flicker allow you to annotate elements of the photograph (as does PhotoSynth). The tags and links represented tie back into the already established web of hand-crafted links and knit them together in new ways. And it potentially goes further: Image formats typically already support time stamps and often a time stamp is registered in a digital photograph's metadata even when the user is unaware of it. Though I've not seen any sign thatPhotoSynth makes use of time data it would be clearly be almost trivial to add that functionality. And that would add an automatic "time index" to the mix. So if you wanted to see pictures of the Vatican in every season you could...or view images stretching back to antiquity.
It's easy to fantasize about how place, time, and meaning-based linking might work together. Let's suppose you stumble across a nifty picture of an African Dance troupe. Metadata links that to a date and location—Lafayette in April of 2005. A user tag associated with the picture is "Festival International." From there you get to the Festival International de Louisiane website. You pull up—effectively create—a 3-D image of the Downtown venue recreated from photos centered on the stage 50 feet from where the metadata says the picture was taken. A bit of exploration in the area finds Don's Seafood, the Louisiana Crafts Guild, a nifty fireman's statue, a fountain (with an amazing number of available photos) and another stage. That stage has a lot of associations with "Zydeco" and "Cajun" and "Creole." You find yourself virtually at the old "El Sido's," get a look at the neighborhood and begin to wonder about the connections between place, poverty, culture, and music....
The technologies used in SynthPhoto are not new or unique. Putting them all together is...and potentially points the way toward a very powerful way to enhance the web and make it more powerfully local.
Worth thinking about on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
Lots o' Langiappe:
TED talk Video — uses a Flickr data set to illustrate how the program can scoop up any imagry. This was the first reference I fell across.
Photo Tourism Video — Explains the basics, using the photo tourism interface. Shows the annotation feature of the program...
PhotoSynth on the Web Video: a version of the program is shown running in a web browser; only available to late version Microsoft users. (Web Site)
Microsoft Interactive Visual Media Group Site. Several of these projects look very interesting—and you can see how some of the technologies deployed in PhotoSynth have been used in other contexts.
If we're all gonna love having big pipes here in Lafayette and find ourselves living on the web as a consequence (like I think we will when we're not dancing or eating crawfish or boudin) then we're gonna have to learn to deal with the dreaded "information overload."
The problem is an embarrassment of riches: the net makes so much information effortlessly available that it is all too easy to while away the hours when you could be doing something useful like playing with your grandchildren or searching out the best boudin place doing something merely mundane like keeping up with the news on LUS' fiber system.
Not Good.
Don't let it happen to you.
Play a bit with Yahoo pipes and you'll discover that for a small upfront investment in time spent building a pipe you can eliminate a host of tedious clicks from you regular routine. Yahoo pipes lets you concatenate RSS feeds into one giant feed and search that feed for items of interest, filtering out all the gradu that you wouldn't bother to read anyway.
The simplest pipes (see an example below) just search a set of feeds for all mentions of your favorite thing. You could, for instance, search all Lafayette media mention of your favorite topic. I put together a pipe which will search most of South Louisiana's major media. You can travel to a "pipe" which searches on "Blanco" and today returns mostly the comments on her recent set of vetos. (Be paitient—Yahoo is searching 1278 items and winnowing it down to the 20 or so articles you'll see. And it will do it a LOT faster than you would—so quit your whining.) Another pipe, searching "Vitter" lets you feast on the latest local coverage of the scandal.
It's all very easy really and Yahoo has done its best to make it as easy as possible. In an earlier ToDo article I recommended an animation programming environment called "Scratch" in part for its super easy introduction to visual programming for kids. Yahoo pipes works off the same idea. You are presented with a palette of tools (like sources, user input, operators, and various bits to manipulate your data). You pick up a tool and drop it onto a working canvas, paste source links into the "source" tool, drop a search "operator" onto the canvas, type in your search term, then simply "pull" links to indicate that you want to search your source based on the search terms you typed. Link that to an output device and save. You're done. All very intuitive and fun to play with since you can mess with your connections, sources, and operators to see what they do and how they change what you get.
That sort of quick check is not all you can do—but that should be enough to get you started. Here's a version of the "South Louisiana News Search" that is a redevelopment of one I've put together for my own use that contains more bells and whistles and a rudimentary user interface. (It's a model for some tools I've been thinking about for the Lafayette Commons I'd like to see our community have. (more)) The "South Louisiana News Search" pipe is embedded on a web page and lets you enter your own search term. The return comes back tagged with the website from which it was pulled and is (poorly) time-sorted from most recent to oldest. Now imagine what you could do with geotagging and calendar feeds in addition to the RSS type feeds I've played with here. Then contemplate using Google Gears to pull in database material, give it all a real user interface, and allow you to go offline with the data and the means to do something with it.
This sort of fun and simple tool is only the beginning.
Lagniappe: Your favorite info source hasn't gotten on the RSS bandwagon yet? Try Feedity.com. It will let you convert that page to an (undated) feed that Pipes can use.
Lagniappe2: Don't like my feed? Wish it had Alexandria? Can't fathom why I left off the sports feeds? Wish it included your home town newspaper? Just go to Yahoo, register (free), login, and "clone" that feed. (I've made it publicly available.) Tweak, alter, add, subtract, and improve to your heart's content.
Lafayette's public libraries all now have public, free wireless networks. Both the Advertiser and the Independent ran short pieces announcing the completion of the project. So if you absolutely have to check your email right now here's a map to some additional places you can do so: The Lafayette Public Libraries.
I've been chewing over an informal speech/meeting with Geoff Daily of KillerApp Monday evening from which I came away pretty impressed. He was speaking on what drives broadband usage—especially usage of high-capacity fiber networks. Daily actually gets it—he's not so distracted by the technology itself that he doesn't see that something more is necessary to create real change.
Daily was in town at the behest of Abigail Ransonet (aka fiberina and mistress of Abacus Marketing) who is hosting him here. Geoff, who is "on tour" of communities which have significant fiber to the home networks, is visiting Lafayette with the dual purpose of seeing what we are doing (or planning to do) with our fiber and informing us about what others have done.
What impressed me was that Geoff didn't succumb to the implications of the name of the business for which he works—nor the mindset that is so popular that the name was an obvious choice for a business focused on broadband. He doesn't think there is going to be a "KillerApp" that drives full utilization of fiber networks and leads to broadband utopia.
What Daily pointed out Monday was that most of the applications that people expect will drive broadband usage already exist. Some of them don't really require big broadband if only a few people are using them—and only a few people are. Those that do require a big pipe don't appear to be widely adopted where the bandwidth is available. The missing element is adoption. Waiting for "the killer app" is just a way of putting off the real works: preparing the community to make use of the many advantages which fiber's big bandwidth makes available.
Without community education—and providing a way for that education to occur—networks may be fiscally successful. But they will not realize the dreams of their advocates to provide a foundation for accelerated growth, equity, and a markedly better quality of life for citizens.
The "build it and they will come" assumption is insufficient to those goals. Building a community-owned fiber network is, I believe, a necessary precondition realize such dreams. Privately-owned networks will never be motivated to serve the needs of the community except indirectly. If any community hopes to get ahead of the curve or to simply control its own destiny it must own its own tools. That's true for carpenters and that's true for cities. Lafayette did the right thing in building its own network. But Geoff Daily reminds us that this is only the beginning. (Check out his blog at KillerApp for relevant ideas.)
Daily pointed to the Utopia project in Utah as one that appeared to him to be built on "build it and they will come" assumption. In truth, as Daily probably realizes, this attitude was pretty much forced on them by their statehouse: the state of Utah would only allow local communities to build the networks the private providers refused to build if they leased them out to private service providers. In consequence the Utopia project is not, and cannot be, "utopian" in any real sense. The citizens who own and will have taken the risk in providing the network will find themselves with services that are typical of services offered by any private network since what motivates their providers will be no different from what motivates anyone else's.
That is better than not having such services at all, I'll grant, but that is not what Lafayette voted for—we voted for the dream.
One point was unmistakable: Geoff Daily wants that dream too. He wants to see the technology lead to better things for communities and their residents. That leads him to think that we need a visionary success in at least one community to kickstart nation-wide usage. The country needs to see a place where an advanced network kicks off accelerates growth, decreases inequality, and results in a markedly better quality of life for all its citizens.
I nominate Lafayette.
But, as Geoff's presentation and the following discussion made clear, it won't happen by itself. The the only way that will happen is if LCG, LUS, and the community decide to make it happen.
. A school within a school at Carencro High, AOIT prepares students for careers in the broad field of information technology and is affiliated with the national academy foundation. AOIT is a leader in the national academy and its leadership sits on several committees driving changes in the national program. The award cited in the story was actually given to Louisiana Public Broadcasting and showcases several of Lafayette's tech jewels including LUS Fiber, LITE, AOC, and AOIT:ncluding how it is used in all Lafayette Parish public schools and is expected to be throughout the whole city by this summer. As the infrastructure portion of it nears completion, Huval said the focus will turn toward how fiber can be applied in both schools and the community.
(World Studies Institute of Louisiana). The pilot project, underway currently, connects classrooms in New Brunswick, Louisiana, and Haiti. Students and their teacher collaborate through Lafayette Commons, a Lafayette nonprofit that supplies the educational edition of Google Apps and support to the project.
